"Misinformation research" industry takes a well-deserved hit
The left’s desire to control the flow of information to Americans has spawned a new academic (or pseudo-academic) field — “misinformation research.” I learned this from a mournful Washington Post article called “Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks.”
The Post reports that “academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.” The report continues, “the escalating campaign. . .has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.”
But the line between political information and medical information has become blurred. The government’s response to covid did most of the blurring.
To analyze the Post’s article we must ask what “misinformation research” is. From all that appears, it boils down to an attempt by leftists to debunk claims with which they strongly disagree.
If I wanted to give a fancy name to what I’ve been doing online for 20 years, I could call it misinformation research. Mine is directed mostly at the mainstream media. The kind the Post is talking about is directed at certain kinds of conservatives.
Actually, the censors who control state-run media in any dictatorship could call themselves misinformation researchers. And their work, not the efforts of conservative bloggers like me, is the closest analogy to the misinformation research industry whose goal is to have content censored.
To my knowledge, no one objects to academics trying to debunk political claims they believe to be incorrect. And if these academics want to append a fancy name to this activity, that’s okay, too.
The problem arises when they try to censor those who make claims these academics deem erroneous. And that’s what they and their counterparts in government have attempted to do on social media. And it’s what the “legal campaign” about which the Post complains is intended to stop.
When liberal academics and government employees conclude that a claim they disagree with is misinformation, they have not been content to refute the claim. The concept of a marketplace of ideas in which conflicting claims compete and the public decides which ones to believe has no appeal to these leftists.
Instead, they try to induce, if not coerce, online media platforms to remove the alleged “misinformation.” And major social media platforms have often been willing to oblige. According to a report cited by the Post, Meta, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and YouTube labeled, removed or suppressed more than one-third of the posts the researchers flagged.
That’s an awful lot of censorship for a free country.
Now let’s turn specifically to the communication of medical information. The Post reports that NIH officials are warning employees not to flag misleading social media posts and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.
This is overkill and perhaps passive-aggressive behavior. NIH’s communications with the public should not be limited to answering questions, nor is it so limited by the court order in Missouri v. Biden.
NIH is free to criticize any social media post with which it disagrees. The Missouri v. Biden ruling bars only "threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech."
The restriction on pressuring social media companies to censor content would be appropriate even if NIH and the federal government as a whole could be counted on to tell us, reliably, what is true and not true about contentious medical issues. But during the pandemic, the government proved it could not be counted on to do this.
The government provided misleading information about the efficacy of masks. It did so either when it told us masks aren’t effective or when, soon thereafter, it told us they are.
In my opinion, the government was out-of-line both times because when it issued these statements, it didn’t have enough information to say with a high degree of confidence whether or not masks are effective against covid.
The government/medical establishment also presented misleading information when it declared, with certainty, that the virus did not originate in a Chinese lab. And it misled the public into believing that anti-covid vaccines are more effective in preventing infection than they actually are.
I don’t blame the government/medical establishment for being wrong about a given matter of even several of them. Just about everyone who opined regularly about covid got something wrong. After all, this was quite the novel virus.
What bothers me is the certainty and stridency with which the government/medical establishment made its pronouncements. It’s that certainty and stridency — the same now exhibited by the misinformation research industry — that caused the loss of so much credibility.
The reality that it’s so easy to be wrong doesn’t just support my claim that the government shouldn’t be a party to the censoring of medical “misinformation.” It supports the claim that viewpoint censorship is almost always a bad idea.
No one has a monopoly on the truth — not misinformation researchers at Stanford and not medical professionals at NIH. A free marketplace of ideas remains the best way of getting at the truth. Therefore, no one should be allowed to monopolize what can be said to be true.
This view is fundamental to American democracy (“Democracy dies in darkness” and all that). Contrary to what misinformation researchers appear to believe, it did not become obsolete with the emergence of social media and Donald Trump. Rather, the need for the airing of dissenting views was reinforced by the Russia collusion hoax and the pandemic.